How to Use the New FriendFeed Search for Social Media Intelligence
FriendFeed, a cross-network activity aggregator built by ex-Googlers and more fun to use than the phrase "cross-network activity aggregator" might imply, launched a powerful new search tool today. Want to discover particularly interesting conversations or people in your networks? Want to pick out just the noisiest conversations online about your brand? Want to find some really crazy stuff that's only discoverable through FriendFeed? The investigative possibilities that FriendFeed now offers are quite impressive, if you can bring just a little creativity to your search query construction.
Here are our favorite examples of some of the searches we've already found quite valuable.
The New Search Options
As you can see from the screen below, the new FriendFeed Advanced Search options are quite granular. You can limit your search to particular sites like Facebook, Amazon or any of 50 other sites supported for import. You can search your network of friends or the site at large. You can set a popularity threshold by number of comments or "likes." There are lots of options. All searches have RSS feeds for their results.
Brand Monitoring
For most people, tracking conversations around a brand name will probably be the most useful function of the new FriendFeed search. We find that relatively boring, so we'll get it out of the way first.
Mentions of "Sun Microsystems," system wide, with 3 or more comments.
Obviously FriendFeed is quite small right now so this isn't a comprehensive web-wide conversation tracker, but these search results could help point to issues that are catching part of the public's imagination enough to discuss. There are less than 1 million people using FriendFeed so far.
There are other searches that can provide more tangible value right now, even without a large number of people yet using the service.
Well Placed People
Location declarations through Brightkite, from friends of Creative Commons Foundation CEO Joi Ito, where 3 or more people "liked" the location statement or description. Chris Messina excluded, in order to see more of other people.
Your Wittiest Friends
Comments by my friends, tracked by Backtype, with 3 or more "likes." I've subscribed to this feed as there are some important details here that I wouldn't have wanted to miss. If you haven't signed up for BackType, or haven't tied it to your FriendFeed account yet, you should. It's easy to do.
Hot and Topical
FriendFeed rooms are a place to discuss a wide variety of topics. Here's some of the most commented on items in the Green Tech room. Find someone who made a great comment here? You can also search for all the rest of their comments.
The Hottest Events
What events are the cool kids going to, that their friends think are particularly cool? Here's events that friends of crafty inventor Bre Petis have said they are going to on Upcoming.org and that their friends have "liked." Robert Scoble excluded for the sake of seeing other people.
What Else Can Be Done?
Those are our favorite examples so far, but we're sure we'll come up with some more in the next few days. The FriendFeed search back-end sometimes barfs if you search friends of very popular users, but it seems to be holding up much better than it was a few weeks ago.
We love FriendFeed here at ReadWriteWeb - you can see all our accounts there via this slideshow.
What are some of the most powerful queries you've thought up with the new FriendFeed search? We'd love to know.
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I call it Lucene
Good stuff, Marshall. Where did you get the 1 million friend feed users stat? Curious if that's registered users or active users.
Great post Marshall. Do you know by chance is they same query terms are available through their search API?
Oh man this is awesome! Now I want these capabilities in FriendDeck :)
Posted by: Peter Kelley
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February 3, 2009 6:01 PM
Linda, I admit I base that 1 million users on seeing Compete stats that put FriendFeed unique visitors at roughly 1/4 or 1/5 of Twitter traffic. Twitter has 4 or 5 million estimated users.
Edwin, that's a good question - as a developer yourself, your guess is better than mine. :)
thats really cook, now if it was a more application based would be awesome!
This is an awesome development by FF, congrats to them.
Having a seamless network aggregation service that now has a strong search on top of it, I believe, gives FF the opportunity to evolve from something of a time-sink of conversation chatter to a really useful source of information.
Thanks for the post.
More social search, more powerful, only getting stronger- this has to be the future, right?
I have one thing to say. Brilliant!
@Edwin:
The search API seems to be pretty complete:
http://code.google.com/p/friendfeed-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation#/api/feed/search_-_Search
Excellent post.
Great post. It is nice to see FriendFeed developing. Its most useful feature might turn out to be the searchable database it is made of. Now with this improvements you can literally pinpoint and tailor your feeds to fit all your needs. I hope they keep doing such a good job.
goood article
Google the best
Friendfeed is really developing into more than I thought possible. This search feature is very cool and will save me time. I signed up for Backtype just a short while ago so thanks for the tip. It's like a opening a present!
A useful overview of a great feature - Friendfeed can be quite overwhelming for new users, so being able to pull "stuff I'm interested in" out of the stream might be a good way to ease people into the service.
Awesome development and thoroughly explained thank you.
Posted by: lelapin
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February 4, 2009 10:27 AM
Great post Marshall.
I would agree that the FriendFeed search capabilities are really interesting but in terms of brand monitoring, we have to remember that it's only searching the subset of users (say from BrightKite) that also happen to have a FriendFeed.
SocialMention.com, on the other hand, is more of a true social media search engine in the sense that it searches all social media properties directly (including FriendFeed) to provide results.
Check it out: http://socialmention.com
@jon,
For some reason I had never heard of socialmention before now. Cool site. As the noise increases on these social networks, searching is becoming an ever important part of increasing the signal in your stream. I'm kind of grappling with that myself right now. However socialmention.com is almost like a google for social networking. I didn't see any ranking or technorati type functionality that would help reduce the stream of info for me. It would be just too overwhelming without some sort of pre-filter or getting really specific in the search. I rely on the Digg's and Technorati's of this world to float most of the cream to the top so I can maximize my intake in less time. Within friendfeed, your groups, friends and Most popular type feeds provide a similar sort of pre-filter.
Anyway, this is still the wild west with all this stuff. It requires constant attention to tune your network to accommodate the latest features and capabilities of social networking applications.
this is an excellent post. Nice one! http://bit.ly/eM1h
Posted by: Clay Newton
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February 4, 2009 1:56 PM
FF keeps getting better and better. I'm curious how people are accessing it. Do you go straight to FF, post mostly from Twitter, or Facebook?
Glad to find this out. Irony ?- I found this article through my RSS feed of FriendFeed. Now, to try the brand search. Thanks for the tip RRW.
Marshall
In Dec when we tracked, Friendfeed was less than 100,000 users, so I really doubt its over a million in 2 months. FriendFeed usage (# of visits per user) is higher than Twitter since Twitter users use a variety of other mechanisms to update (which are not counted on Compete).
The real number of Friendfeed users is closer to 200K to 400K and 23% actives.
Awesome development and thoroughly explained thank you.